Don't skip Vista, says Microsoft

[Th0r]

good conclusion,

However I would expect them to tell the consumer:"this is why we recomend you try vista 1st"

 

[medicnick83]

I'm going to rather stay with XP

 

[Th0r]

I'm going to rather stay with XP

Till when?

 

[Arthur]

My dad started a computer company (Spartan Computers) and I was pretty much involved with all the MS-Dos/OS2/Windows milestones. I still remember the OOBE days very well

Yes, I remember Spartan well - one of the most professional PC companies in the country in the PC's heyday, before everything commoditised. Are your dad's initials A.L.?

Reminder to Apple OSX users: don't forget to install Patch Thursday's 44MB "Security Update" which fixes another 45 bugs, plus more fixes for X11, Perl, Python and Safari. And get the latest Java for Mac updates and fixes while you're about it.

 

[Pr1$m]

XP FOREVER!!!!!!!!!


Just kidding, just need a machine with some vooma to run Windows Vista/ 7.

Meh

 

[RoosTa]

Yes, I remember Spartan well - one of the most professional PC companies in the country in the PC's heyday, before everything commoditised. Are your dad's initials A.L.?

No, thats Anton Leal. My dad (one of the five owners) was the FD before Anton moved on.

UCS Group bought Spartan in 1994.

But I basically grew up at Spartan House and learnt a lot of about the software industry.

 

[SirFooK'nG]

Vista Machine Requirements

XP FOREVER!!!!!!!!!


Just kidding, just need a machine with some vooma to run Windows Vista/ 7.

Meh

The requirements are not that high for Vista, my "baby" system is an AMD64 3000+ with 2gig ram (DDR400). And it purrrrs with vista! And that is an old system!! I actually reckon its exactly on par with XP for speed.

 

[Th0r]

that setup has got some RAM and vista wants RAM, other req isnt that hectic, as long as there is some RAM

 

[SirFooK'nG]

Ram + Vista

that setup has got some RAM and vista wants RAM, other req isnt that hectic, as long as there is some RAM

Only just recently put the extra 1gig in the machine, came about for free... so why not. Still ran just fine with 1gig!

 

[Raithlin]

that setup has got some RAM and vista wants RAM, other req isnt that hectic, as long as there is some RAM

Not so. I ran Windows 7 beta on my machine (AM2 3800+, 1GB RAM)- ran much better than Vista (Ultimate), and with more free RAM too. It really is a quantum jump - the way Vista should have been.

That said, I'm trying harder every day to become Linux-based. Difficult, being a .Net developer and all, but possible.

 

[Arthur]

No, thats Anton Leal. My dad (one of the five owners) was the FD before Anton moved on.

UCS Group bought Spartan in 1994.

But I basically grew up at Spartan House and learnt a lot of about the software industry.

Nice place to grow up. I don't want to start a guessing game and embarrass myself, but it could very well be N.M.? No need to answer that, of course.

--ooOOoo--

I'm on a roll. To the M$-$ux brigade:

Just a bunch of arrogant doffie programmers under hyperventilator Steve Ballmer? Think again.

I know all analogies break down at some point, and can be easily picked apart with unintended forks (while-wend; W, W-1, -W; fork ww). But here's one I've used before to at least make the point that MS is not staffed by arrogant doffie programmers who can only do buggy bloatware and half-baked systems with lousy designs.

As I've pointed out any times, it is precisely because MS knew the architectural limitations of the PC's origins that it embarked on an entirely new OS in 1985, and that was impossible to achieve without a clean break in apps. But market realities forced MS to change course 180-degrees and retain apps compatibility (along with associated ID and ISV support) even though the security, performance and architectural challenges were regarded as insurmountable. To survive the platform shift, MS had to optimise a limited technology beyond anything its designers ever dreamed of, and then rev it up as demands, speeds and feeds grew expontentially. Analogy: 4-cycle piston-based reciprocating internal combustion engine.

Let's tease out the analogy: Compared to other engine designs the 4-cycle reciprocating piston-based internal combustion engine is inelegant to say the least (and MS engineers have always granted the same holds for Windows - it would be commercial suicide to keep on saying this publicly, just as Benz won't be caught saying its Otto Cycle engine is a less-than-ideal design). Our cars here in 21st century use engine architectures from a century ago because of history, because of the immense and widely dispersed installed base of mechanics, dealers, secondary industries, component manufacturers, home tinkerers, sub-system providers, &c, not to speak of the actual users/drivers themselves. You can't just introduce a car that ignores or bypasses all that and expect to stay in business very long - you have to bring them all with you (many a system/hw vendor back then forgot that point and died; even the once mightly and hugely arrogant Apple Computer with it perpetually proprietary systems forgot that point and in a few years shrank from the height of 55% marketshare to 5%). To power modern cars using conventional widely-available fuel (also a historical legacy), and to sell, service and support them through a massive independently owned dealer/service network, the modern engine has to run at speeds and loads its inventors never imagined possible, with immensely complex sub-systems. Ditto Windows.

In several ways Windows today is like an Otto Cycle engine running at 75,000 or even 100,000 r/min. To get an engine to run pretty reliably at that speed takes incredible engineering, as well as deep knowledge of and skill in a whole range of disciplines like metallurgy, fluid dynamics, machining & manufacturing, etc. Ditto with Windows. Regular Windows, like XP, is doing stuff reasonably reliably at the mechanical equivalent of a 100,000 r/min engine runnning all day, every day on millions and millions of systems with a very wide range of capabilities and widely varying hardware quality. (OK, so you don't have the physical manufacturing/replication challenge, but getting the code down takes the best brains on the planet).

Put aside your brand religion and look at the whole business with a dispassionate eye. Microsoft turned around on a dime with a nimbleness even small companies envy. By its own lights, taking the DOS+Win heritage was NOT Microsoft's preferred choice, but it had the humility to actually listen to the market and change course. The challenge was that this required it to attempt something no-one believed possible, ie tweak Windows to run in a way that preseved compatibility yet exploited new capabilities whilst maintaining the best possible system integrity. To do this, MS needed the best and most innoative brains available anywhere, and so recruited top skills available in the industry and academia.

Under the ultimate direction of Rhodesian/South African Paul Maritz, Microsoft drove the technical and business strategy to propel Windows to where it is today. It is an incredible acheivement against immense odds. It demanded (and still demands) and engineering capability unequalled anywhere. And yet, precisely because Microsoft succeeded so spectacularly (which meant others lost) it draws nothing but snide remarks and sneers from those and their minions who lost the battle and ran to governments for protection. And governments obliged, with manifestly unjust rulings that Microsoft had somehow been unfair. But that's another story. By the way, Paul is a supersmart quiet guy, with real humility and absolute integrity. He is also the chief strategist that made all this happen, so there's a local boy who changed the world.

As V3G well says, we should be grateful there are so many choices for us. The industry has come a long way, and it's fascinating story, still evolving. But let's not rant on in ignorance and half-baked knowledge, denigrating people and personalities we don't know and have never met. Did you know the strongest Apple Mac supporters ouside of Apple are inside Microsoft? They are. Did you know that at it's lowest point, Apple was bailed out by Microsoft with a massive cash injection and a commitment to keep developing Office for the Mac, a life-saving move? Did you know that some of greatest defenders of Microsoft's incredible technical and business achievements were once hugely vociferous critics.

It's a free world, of course, so you can skip XP, or Vista, or Win7 if you want. Run what works for you. This side of the grave everything's a compromise, even Linux or OSX or *IX or whatever, so you choose what's best for you. I would only ask that the ignorant quit their endless ad hominems and ignorant pastisan fanboi jabs. By all means defend and promote your fave OS or apps or whatever, but it's really unseemly and even embarrassing to think your own flag is raised by dragging down someone else's.

If it works for you, please, please, please stay with XP, or *x or whatever; skip Vista or anything else. I know from the inside the last thing Microsoft wants is to force anyone to anything. Attract, persuade, seduce, convince, sell - yes. But, please, let's keep the discussions clean and rational.

 

[vodacom3g]

Did you know that at it's lowest point, Apple was bailed out by Microsoft with a massive cash injection and a commitment to keep developing Office for the Mac, a life-saving move? Did you know that some of greatest defenders of Microsoft's incredible technical and business achievements were once hugely vociferous critics.

Bill actually said "Invest in Snapple...", but his investors misunderstood him.

 

[apogeeza]

Everything must be black and white for you guys .

1. OSX is just plainly superior to anything Microsoft under Ballmer or any other executron will ever be able to come up with. MS is not a company which innovates but a company which sells vapourware and assimilates other companies. Just look at all the security holes in Windows, Office, ActiveX
and all their other products.

+10

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10163563-16.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheOpenRoad

No, the real problem with the retail stores is that they demonstrate a continued lack of creativity and innovation at Microsoft. Don't believe me? Well, how about these products that broke new ground in innovation?

* XBox (Sony Playstation)
* Live Search (Google, Yahoo)
* Zune (Apple iPod)
* Vista/Windows 7 (Apple's Mac OS X)
* I'm a PC advertising campaign (Apple's Mac vs. PC campaign)
* SharePoint (Documentum - though to be fair, SharePoint is significantly better than Documentum and the old-school ECM products)
* Tabbed browsing and other features in IE (Firefox)

And so on. Even Microsoft's Surface, which is very cool, functions much like an iPhone (though at significant scale).

Maybe this isn't all that new. After all, Microsoft's Office product originally started off as a rip-off of WordPerfect, and has hardly changed since the day Microsoft killed off WordPerfect. This is why Mitchell Baker's counsel to the European Commission to not allow Microsoft to dominate the browser market is timely and important: Microsoft is not an innovator, and becomes even less of one when it dominates a market.

Microsoft does a great job of executing against others' innovations. It is not an innovator, however, as David Wheeler called out back in 2001.

In this way it's much like the criticism it has of open source: Microsoft claims that open source steals others' intellectual property and doesn't innovate. Pot calling kettle black?

Remember the frenzied development of the "Browser Wars" days? And after the death of Netscape, the development of IE came to a standstill. Only recently has IE dev been kicked into gear again ... by Firefox (so they couldn't kill NN afterall )

 

[apogeeza]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Th0r
that setup has got some RAM and vista wants RAM, other req isnt that hectic, as long as there is some RAM

Not so. I ran Windows 7 beta on my machine (AM2 3800+, 1GB RAM)- ran much better than Vista (Ultimate), and with more free RAM too. It really is a quantum jump - the way Vista should have been.

I agree with Th0r, Vista requires RAM. The more the better. I have 4Gigs of RAM, and at boot-up, when it's finished doing it's thang... It uses 1.32Gigs or so of the RAM to just sit there and purr.

But read this:

I don't post too often on the forums but I felt this was one worth saying something in. There's this popular misconception that Vista is a severe recourse hog when in fact all it's doing is making use of otherwise wasted unused RAM.

Let me explain.

Vista monitors which apps you use frequently and unlike XP remembers it then loads in into RAM on next boot so it will start more quickly. For example I use Word 2007 and Firefox quite a bit so my page file usage usually sits between 500 and 600 mb (used to be up to 800 before clean install), so now when I start Firefox it starts in one second rather than the several it takes on XP after a clean boot. Here's the kicker, when you start up a RAM heavy app like say a game, Vista clears all that out of the RAM and you get to play without chop. Wanting to always have as little ram used as possible is such a silly idea, because thats just a waste of free RAM that could be used for something like say faster application startup. I get tired of seeing the same argument for this when no one bothers to research why it is so.

So, with that in mind (and that bit about the "speed up my machine with a turbo boost thingy" which I have not jet implemented ) I've now taken to watching my system like a hawk : I want to see if these apps really do launch quicker etc even though my ram is being "stolen" by a heavy OS for the purposes of looking pretty when it should be allocating my resources with responsibility (if I am to believe Isengard, that is.

Since I use MANY resource heavy apps simultaneously and open then close them rather often. I have to do this because Windows does not NATIVELY have the multiple desktops that Linux has. (I keep all Job X's windows on desktop 1, and Job 2's windows on desktop 2, etc. This not possible in windows unless you buy(?) 3-rd paty app, and doubt if it be available for Vista.) I suspect that my computing habits are going to stretch the "RAM aware allocation" capabilities that Isengard says will make my life easier. Time will tell.